This release marks a milestone for PC-BSD, by moving to the latest FreeBSD 7-Stable and also incorporating the KDE 4.1.1 desktop. Users will immediately notice the improved visual interface that KDE 4.1.1 offers, as well as a large improvement in hardware support and speed from the update to FreeBSD 7-Stable. PC-BSD 7 also offers a large and growing library of self-contained PBI files available for installation, and improvments for other locales on our PBI Directory website. This release also offers new methods of installation, including a DVD, USB and Internet/network install. Note: Here is an interview with the lead developer of PC-BSD.

I used FreeBSD for a desktop for a few years, and while initial setup was a bit of work, it was the most stable desktop I have ever used.

That's what I do since FreeBSD 4.0 without any problems. :-)

There is also excellent documentation.

An aspect worth mentioning. Unlike the most Linusi, the BSDs are documented very well. As a developer, this is of highest importance to me. Every part of the OS has a manual page: system tools, kernel interfaces, library calls, configuration files and maintenance operations. Most ports follow this good idea, except, "of course", the big desktop environments (that don't seem to have adequate offline documentation), sadly. Next to the offline material accessible via the man command and the doc/ subtrees, there's the FreeBSD handbook and other interesting stuff. Most of this documentation can be applied to PC-BSD, because in fact it's the same OS.

As far as being more "command-line focused" once your DE is setup, it is no more "command-line focused" than Linux.

That's correct. If you don't want to use the CLI, you don't have to. PC-BSD's developers did a great job providing tools for nearly everything that can be done via CLI, such as upgrading the system, installing applications and configuring services. But if you're a professional and work faster using the CLI, this option is still there.